…medical school cadaver. So a few questions for any current or former med students/professors: (don’t worry, there’s no reason to suppose I need answers fast)
Is this still a thing? Do med students still get a cadaver to carve up and study?
Is there any way to condition my donation with the stipulation that it will be used as a medical school cadaver? Instead of a target for testing the effectiveness of a new design for flamethrowers, or something?
Is the fact that I currently have an artificial right hip a bar to having my cadaver issued to a student (as an aside, how would you like to be the student whose cadaver has TWO artificial hips? I’m not anticipating a high score on the “Anatomical Structures of the Hip” practicum. I guess I might as well start Spring Break early. See y’all in Cabo!)?
Yes, using donated bodies directed towards medical student training is still very much a thing. According to this recent article, donations are actually rising and helping to alleviate body shortages* (it seems that one way to get around high funeral costs is to donate your body - some med schools will return the remains to the family later, after cremation).
Having one artificial hip shouldn’t be a bar to donation. It would probably add interest and educational value.
While med students have probably forgotten 90% of what they learned in gross anatomy class by the time they graduate, it’s still a foundation for what they may need to know later on.
*nowhere near as critical a problem as in the 19th century, when med school profs dealt with illicit body snatchers like Burke and Hare.
Yes, this remains a thing. For example, here’s the link for the body donation program at the University of Wisconsin medical school; here’sthe one for Oregon Health Sciences University; here for U of Iowa. Different programs have different requirements. Look up ‘body donation’ and the medical school of your choice on the Googler.
Videos of gross anatomy dissections as performed at UW-Madison are available here: you have been warned.
Having a hip replacement should not be a disqualifier, unless you die before the wounds heal, or you contracted a communicable disease like hepatitis or HIV or CJD as a result. Body size may be a disqualifier, or major trauma, or prior organ donation. I dissected a cadaver who had had her gallbladder and appendix removed, and another with artificial knees. Another cadaver in the lab had a plate in his skull. Students can move from cadaver to cadaver if their subject is, say, missing a colon, or has a grossly cirrhotic liver.
If you donate your body to a medical school, you still may or may not end up being dissected by med students. Probably you will, but they may end up using you piecemeal for other training purposes, like teaching surgical techniques, or preparing prosections. Ask whoever is running the program.
Personally, while I’d be happy with my remains being used to train med students, what I’d really like would be to be turned into one of those sliced-cadaever museum exhibits. But I’m guessing that that’s a little harder to arrange.
Can I get funny tattoos on various places on my body, for the purpose of entertaining the student? Example: My family says I’m in “a better place” now. I’d say that’s up to you.
I’ve posted it here before … but I made mutual wills with a friend of mine that the survivor of the two of is will make the other’s skull into a drinking cup.
A significant one now is size; really obese bodies are harder to use for learning because of the layers of fat, and can be too big for the equipment used to move bodies and tables to hold them. I think anyone over 300 pounds is too big for a med school to want as a donation.
AIUI, there is value in presenting the students with a wide variety of cadavers to work on so they develop an appreciation of the variability in human anatomy. If you have 30 gross anatomy students dissecting 30 cadavers, all of which were perfectly healthy adult males of median weight and height, they won’t learn as much as if the cadavers are all different. Soooo, this cadaver had arthritis, that one had a hip implant, that other one had cirrhosis; everybody gather around this particular cadaver, and see what this condition looks like, and compare it mentally against what that healthy cadaver over there looks like.
